May 04, 2022 • Joy Zhang • Resources • 4 minutes

At some point during your machine learning journey you may get stuck on a problem, start to lose motivation, or find yourself unable to keep up the rapid rate of new developments. In these situations, I find communities have a lot to offer regardless…

February 17, 2022 • Joy Zhang • Resources • 5 minutes

Reinforcement learning is a subdomain of machine learning in which agents learn to make decisions by interacting with their environment. It recently gained popularity through its ability to achieve superhuman-levels of play in games like Go, Chess…

December 16, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Resources • 8 minutes

AI game competitions are also known as AI programming competitions or bot programming competitions. They're different from your average data science competition. In an AI game competition, you aren't given a data set. Instead, you get a game or…

November 29, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Updates • 3 minutes

Welcome to Bomberland Bomberland is a new multi-agent AI competition starting 3 December 2021. It features an adversarial environment inspired by the classic console game, Bomberman. The goal is to program intelligent agents that compete in a 2D grid…

October 28, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Resources • 5 minutes

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a subdomain of machine learning which involves agents learning to make decisions by interacting with their environment. While popular competition platforms like Kaggle are mainly suited for supervised learning problems…

October 22, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Tutorial • 6 minutes

An overview of self-play Competitive self-play involves training an agent against itself. It was used in famous systems such as AlphaGo and OpenAI Five (Dota 2). By playing increasingly stronger versions of itself, agents can discover new and better…

September 30, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Resources • 6 minutes

This blog post is a compilation of reinforcement learning (RL) project ideas to check out. I've tried to select projects covering a range of different difficulties, concepts, and algorithms in RL. If you're more interested in RL competitions where…

September 24, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Updates • 3 minutes

In March 2016, DeepMind's AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol 4-1 in a televised match viewed by over 200 million people. There was a global shortage in Go boards, and AlphaGo's victory is seen as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence. Shortly after in…

September 22, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Tutorial • 5 minutes

This article is part 4 of the series 'A hands-on introduction to deep reinforcement learning using Unity ML-Agents'. It's also suitable for anyone interested in using Unity ML-Agents for their own reinforcement learning project. Sections Part…

September 07, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Tutorial • 9 minutes

This article is part 3 of the series 'A hands-on introduction to deep reinforcement learning using Unity ML-Agents'. It's also suitable for anyone new to Unity interested in using ML-Agents for their own reinforcement learning project. Sections Part…

September 01, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Tutorial • 11 minutes

This article is part 2 of the series 'A hands-on introduction to deep reinforcement learning using Unity ML-Agents'. It's also suitable for anyone new to Unity interested in using ML-Agents for their own reinforcement learning project. Sections Part…

August 27, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Tutorial • 5 minutes

This article is part 1 of the series 'A hands-on introduction to deep reinforcement learning using Unity ML-Agents'. It's also suitable for anyone new to Unity interested in using ML-Agents for their own reinforcement learning project. Sections Part…

August 26, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Tutorial • 2 minutes

Purpose If you're new to reinforcement learning (RL), there's some great introductory courses out there. Just to name a few: Introduction to Reinforcement Learning by David Silver Spinning Up by OpenAI Reinforcement Learning Specialization by…

August 18, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Resources • 3 minutes

Whether you're a beginner or veteran in machine learning and data science, you might be interested in a place to ask questions, share projects, or join discussions on the latest developments. There are many great communities out there for this, but…

August 13, 2021 • Matthew Duong • Industry • 2 minutes

Introduction This content is based on the my own biased opinions on the industry having worked mainly in the US for corporate tech and having hired for a few positions when running my own startup. Take everything with a grain of salt when forming…

August 11, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Resources • 7 minutes

Inspired by Slime Volleyball Gym, I built a 3D Volleyball environment using Unity's ML-Agents toolkit. The full project is open-source and available at: 🏐 Ultimate Volleyball. Ultimate Volleyball In this article, I share an overview of the…

July 26, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Tutorial • 8 minutes

Tutorial Parts How to build an AI Bomberman bot (Part 1) How to build an AI Bomberman bot (Part 2) How to build an AI Bomberman bot (Part 3) An introduction to A* pathfinding The A* pathfinding (or A* search) algorithm is a popular technique for…

July 19, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Tutorial • 6 minutes

Tutorial Parts How to build an AI Bomberman bot (Part 1) How to build an AI Bomberman bot (Part 2) How to build an AI Bomberman bot (Part 3) Recap So far we've covered: Setting up the game environment Dungeons and Data Structures Working with a…

June 24, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Tutorial • 7 minutes

This is an introductory tutorial for anyone interested in building their own AI to play in a game. All you need to start is some familiarity with programming in Python. We'll be using a custom game environment called Dungeons and Data Structures. It…

June 17, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Resources • 3 minutes

I recently interviewed 30+ people from the technology industry involved in recruiting software engineers and data scientists about their hiring challenges. This included recruiters, heads of talent, and hiring managers at startups to large corporates…

May 24, 2021 • Ben Ye • Community • 6 minutes

Behind the knights and wizards and digging past the cold calculating algorithms, are a group of dedicated and passionate engineers who have spent over 16 days crafting their perfect agent in the AI Sports Challenge. Read on to meet the teams and…

May 17, 2021 • Ben Ye • Community • 4 minutes

The AI Sports Challenge returns! Between April 22nd — May 7th, 24 teams from around the world competed in the second AI Sports Challenge for a slice of $5,000 AUD. After an intense 16 days of coding and two tournament phases, we crowned our AI Sports…

May 16, 2021 • Matthew Duong • Engineering • 1 minutes

Context I built a game playing agent tournament. To give some context this wasn't entirely from scratch. I had the benefit of learning from the previous tournament which had a few flaws. December 2020 tournament Design The previous tournament was…

May 05, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Tutorial • 9 minutes

Edit 5 Oct 2021: I've added a Colab notebook version of this tutorial here. In this introductory tutorial, we'll apply reinforcement learning (RL) to train an agent to solve the 'Taxi' environment from OpenAI Gym. We'll cover: A basic introduction to…

April 11, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Community • 6 minutes

The AI Sports Challenge 2021 is an online AI programming competition sponsored by Deputy, Lab17, MongoDB and GitLab. Thank you also to our community partners Hackathons Australia, General Assembly, SitePoint and the Data Science and AI Association of…

February 08, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Community • 5 minutes

The AI Sports Challenge is an AI programming tournament for developers of all levels. Teams across the globe participate by programming their own bot to compete in an online multiplayer game — played entirely by other bots. Run as a virtual hackathon…

January 16, 2021 • Joy Zhang • Community • 3 minutes

Between 11–18 December 2020, over 400 developers across 20 countries competed in the first-ever AI Sports challenge for a chance to win $10,000 AUD in prizes and giveaways. But there could only be one winner: after an intense week of coding…